Digital SLR advice for a new owner

Well, technically not an owner yet. Ordered a Canon 350D from Jessops last weekend (Kit includes: EOS 350D body (black), EF-S 18-55mm non-USM Lens,
55-200mm Lens, Grip BG-E3). Got a phone call from them on Tuesday evening just before i came offshore to say it is now in and waiting for me.

So, the question is: does anyone have advice for an SLR newbie?

I've used plenty of compact digital cameras in the past (my trust Sony P10 has served me well this past couple of years) but the whole SLR thing is a little daunting, so many things to take into account and think about. Anyone know of good beginers guides or anything similar?

If i didn't have such an unpredictable working life (can be sent offshore for unspecified periods of time at a moments notice) i would probably sign up for an evening class or something at the local college, but that isn't very practical right now.

SLR's offer considerably more control and range than your average compact, and it's great to have all that power....but for the most part, people find a selection of settings they like, get good and them, and then only deviate from said settings for unusual pictures or when they're experimenting.

For instance, I find that my camera is almost always set to Apature priority, set as large (low) as it'll go, mostly 1.8-2.0 because I do a lot of portrait pics, and really appreciate well done bokeh. I'm just too lazy to get my shutter settings right every single time. I'll sometimes move away from apature priority if I'm looking for an interesting action shot, where I'll move to shutter priority.

I still see myself as distinctly amatuer, and until I find myself comfortably working in total manual control of the camera, I shall remain as such. However, this doesn't make me feel like I'm getting less out of my camera than I should be, it just means I've got lots left to learn, and as long as I get pics that I'm satisfied with, I don't feel bad about that at all....

hmmmm... Thanks for that yamangman, i'll see if i can haggle with Jessops. I know when my Dad got his Sony P100 they looks online and gave him that price after he told them that John Lewis had a better deal.

Finally got home on thursday so picked up my 350D yesterday. Ended up paying full price for it, they don't price match anywhere when buying on finance. Which i guess is fair enough as the finance will probably cost them anyway.

Found a bunch of Capitol Bonds i got from a job a few months ago in the bottom of a drawer and what do you know, Jessops take them so i got a half decent tripod and padded rucksack. Still got £50 of them left, might see about a couple of filters or something eventually.

I hope I'm not massively under-rating your photographic knowledge but my view is that it's critical to master some of the basic theory of photography and cameras if you wish to be able to produce good shots consistently with your digital camera, whether it is an SLR model or not.

By this I mean, for instance, understand what things makes the depth of field change - so you can knowingly select how much of what you shoot is in focus in front of and behind the main point of focus; and also understand WHY you'd want to be able to make that choice.

For a portrait, you typically only want the subject's face to be in focus - not the background of the subject nor any of the foreground.

How do you achieve that?

Well, you need to know that as you zoom towards the telephoto end of a lens, the depth of field diminishes - and small depth of field is exactly what you want for most portrait shots.

That also means that, if say, you want to create a portrait shot by editing an individual from a wide-angle shot of a group of people, the effect would not be so good as if you'd shot that one person alone and used a lens setting that was further towards the telephoto end.

With that wideangle shot, you'll find that the background and foreground will be more in focus than you really want - and the person you're trying to create a portrait of doesn't stand out distinctly.

Just for the record, on a conventional (non-digital) 35mm SLR camera, a 90mm (non-zoom) lens is often regarded as a good portrait lens, though some people prefer a slightly longer lens, maybe up to as long as 120mm.

Okay, so you can reduce the depth of field by zooming the lens towards the telephoto end but that's not the only way.

You can also reduce the depth of field by increasing the SIZE of the lens aperture - the "hole" through which light passes as it enters the camera (which is usually displayed on the camera's LCD panel or viewfinder as an f-stop number - and, it can be confusing when you first start out to learn that f16, for example, reflects a SMALLER aperture size than, say, f8!).

Conversely (and I've been assuming here that the zoom setting remains unchanged), shooting with a small aperture size will give a wider depth of field.

And that means that if you are already shooting towards the telephoto end, you can reduce the depth of field still further by contriving to reduce the aperture size

On some cameras you can simply choose what the aperture size will be but on others you may only be able to control shutter speed - so you have to "cheat".

And you can cheat by changing the shutter speed.

You can increase depth of field by selecting a longer exposure time - an action which forces the camera to reduce the aperture size to prevent too much light coming in and over-exposing the shot.

But, the longer the camera has its shutter open, the greater the likelihood of camera-shake being visible in what you capture (if the camera is being hand-held), or of some movement made by the subject being captured - and either can ruin the shot, so life isn't necessarily good, or easy.

Oh, and, of course, you can decrease depth of field by choosing a shorter exposure time - an action which forces the camera to increase the aperture size to ensure enough light comes in not to have the shot under exposed.

For a landscape shot you'd normally want the widest possible depth of field - but there are no hard and fast rules in terms of composition, despite what the books might tell you; you can get some wonderful shots with a smaller depth of field.

Typically, though, with landscapes, you would choose to shoot with a small aperture setting and at the wide-angle end of the zoom range - unless you had a good reason to do otherwise.

Oh, and with landscapes - and in contrast with cropping a portait shot from a wide-angle group shot - there would be no BIG downside to, say, deciding to use your image-editing software to crop a landscape image to improve the composition - assuming you'd taken the shot at a high enough quality (ie resolution) setting to allow the extra amount of "blowing up" required when you print that cropped image.

I could bore you all day and all night here, but I won't (not right now) but, hopefully, it will be clear from what I've said that there's a lot of creative potential in the mastery of the use of different depths of field - and that includes understanding the consequences of arriving at a situation where the shot does have the desired depth of field.

But there are other things to master and it is the mastery of all the variables - including where the camera is positioned relative to the subject (near, far, high, low, whatever) that allows you to create the image you have in your mind's eye (and, indeed to formulate that image in your mind's eye), rather than just grabbing whatever happens to be produced by pointing a camera from where you are standing, letting it focus, and pressing the shutter.

Oh, and some of the variables are rather succinctly described right here in this very forum.

i really need to learn a lot more about photography and spend a lot of time playing around with different things. I also need to learn how to use my camera. I guess compaired to a lot of people i haven't got a clue. my problem is i know what can be done, i just don't know how to do it.